i've never really used apple products, but my wife does the macbook iphone thing. we've had two experiences with it randomly deleting her shit.

first time (this was about a year ago, not sure what itunes version):

she got a new iphone, all was well. we wiped the old iphone. one day she dug up her old iphone, and decided to start using it to play music in her car. plugged it into the macbook.

itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files.

plugged her new phone in, it acted as if it had never seen it before, and asked if she'd like to sync. it then deleted all of the music on her new phone as well.

second time:

she'd been using iphoto to organize all of her pictures (many thousands of them)

fired up iphoto one morning, and all of her shit was gone, it was like she'd never used iphoto in the first place.

no sign of the monolithic 'iphoto store' file, or anything. no original pictures. gone.

there are two things my wife loves, pictures and music, and it systematically fucked her entire collection without warning. unfortunately many of these items had not been backed up. these are just my observations, i don't know why it would do these things, and i don't care. i no longer trust that peice of shit operating system or any of its devices, and i use incremental backups of her entire laptop using rsync now (not time machine, i don't trust it either)

No, you find two-stroke engines in applications where you need high power but extremely low weight. Their cheapness is simply a byproduct of their simplicity (hence, weight savings). There are plenty of applications where a 4-stroke engine simply wouldn't work because it would weigh too much (leaf blowers, chain saws, etc) or would be too bulky (mopeds, model airplanes, lawnmowers, etc). Sure their efficiency needs some work, or replacement if a viable alternative is created, but at the moment there are several applications where 4-stroke engines or battery power simply wouldn't work.

the power-to-weight ratio gap is very small these days in the 1hp+ market. engines like the honda GX25 have something like 7lbs making 1hp, perfect for a handheld blower. honda even bolts a perfectly good leaf blower to it, but they only sell it in the european market for some reason, i have no idea why they don't bring it into north america: http://www.honda.co.uk/lawn-an...

it's perfectly ok for a really mature peice of software to stay in a distrubution, even in a relatively unmaintained state.

you don't have to 'change' something just because new features aren't being added anymore, until the lack of a new feature prevents it from being installed on more than a few edge cases, or a substantial bug is found that makes its use unsafe.

as a slackware user myself, i have no real problem with grub and i use it on a few machines where it's advantageous, but most of my systems still boot with lilo, and i don't see any need to change them around in the near future.

even though it's like saying 'attackers with the root password for a unix system have been observed manipulating logs and deleting core system files' deserves security disclosure...

it does also bring up the old double edged sword of requiring signed firmware for devices like this. although a disgruntled admin can certainly cause serious damage, simply being able to hide malicious code at the hardware level via a remote admin interface is bad news.

their profiled "terrorists" are usually from societies that are accustomed to communicating covertly without any electronic means.

i'm not an expert in terrorism or communication, but i was a punk kid once that did bad things. even i was smart enough to know that if you were planning something big and illegal, you didn't go calling people about it, or writing it down.

do they really think that someone is going to send an email or text message saying "hit the big red button 12:30 next tuesday"? or that someone will save a map to a warehouse of deadly weapons in "the cloud" and name it "weaponsmap.jpg"?

of course they don't.

so how is this gaping hole in the intensions of the survaillance plan not being used as leverage to stop this nonsense before america goes from paranoid to total police state at the press of a button one night? are people so weak that all it would take is someone sending an encrypted message about a "serious terrorist act that would kill a lot of people" that's "intercepted" and the plot "stopped" to widen the scope of this stuff?

as someone watching this from outside the USA, it's very confusing to me

considering it's a complex set of ideas that potentially describe how the entire universe and everything in it works, isn't "incomplete" or "unfinished" is about the best we can shoot for at this point

but they're a machine, which makes them for the most part very easy to reverse engineer or copy by any country with a decent science program.

your analogy is broken, since we aren't talking about a hobbyist toy compared to a real machine, we're talking foreign governments (or companies) funding r&d and research into drone technology.

how about a honda civic compared to a ford mustang? (also a good analogy since the foreign product will be junk, at first, based on inappropriate chunks of existing technology from other projects, but eventually will surpass others in reliability...)

debian uses simple release engineering like unstable -> testing -> release. there are other projects that work in a similar way, freebsd is fairly similar. they have commonly done gigantic system-wide break everything for months type changes in freebsd current.

they don't need to fork to test experiental things, they just do it in unstable first. then when they can't find problems, it goes into testing. eventually testing becomes a release.

considering systemd has been in debian in an experimental capacity for nearly 3 years, i think they've done enough testing to consider it stable.

it's nothing like debian/kfreebsd, because changing to a completely different kernel is nothing like changing an init system. not to mention that debian/kfreebsd was expected to have a very long steep development curve with a very small audience, whereas systemd is something that is already proven to be a fairly stable thing. redhat has been using it by default for half a decade.

i'll never use systemd, though. not because i don't trust its stability. the way it works and is configured reminds me of DJB software. makes sense, works well enough, but is wrong on a level that is difficult to explain.

Saying the issue is pretty much totally muslims is like saying "violent pit bull attacks are pretty much totally dogs" or "christian child molesters are pretty much totally christians". Being technically true doesn't mean it's helpful (and doesn't make it less harmful)

In most situations when someone is a total dick, it's either because their position is sketchy and they're attempting to scare people away from the argument, or because they are socially retarded and lack the necessary skills to form their arguments into something socially acceptable.

I've never met Linus, but I can see how confident he is, so lets assume, like so many great geeks, it's the latter.

If your position is strongly grounded, being nice doesn't weaken your position at all, and can in fact strengthen it. Either your enemy eventually walks away feeling that they were defeated by a person with superior intellect AND manners, or in a moment of weakness they will explode in a desperate fit of rage as they refuse to see your side of things, which will cause most observers to side with you.

I'm not sure why he'd think this is an american thing, since people in his part of the world are MUCH nicer than your average resident of the USA, especially in an argument or debate.

An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica responding to statements he made in a conference in New Zealand. One of his classic comments in NZ was: "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that's what's important to me." On diversity, he said that "the most important part of open source is that people are allowed to do what they are good at" and "all that stuff is just details and not really important." Now he writes: "What I wanted to say — and clearly must have done very badly — is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different", and that "I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US," calling the concept of being nice an "ideology".